Biblio

In image forensics, to determine whether the image is impurely transformed, it extracts and examines the features included in the suspicious image. In general, the features extracted for the detection of forgery images are based on numerical values, so it is somewhat unreasonable to use in the CNN structure for image classification. In this paper, the extraction method of a feature vector is using a least-squares solution. Treat a suspicious image like a matrix and its solution to be coefficients as the feature vector. Get two solutions from two images of the original and its median filter residual (MFR). Subsequently, the two features were formed into a visualized pattern and then fed into CNN deep learning to classify the various transformed images. A new structure of the CNN net layer was also designed by hybrid with the inception module and the residual block to classify visualized feature vector patterns. The performance of the proposed image forensics detection (IFD) scheme was measured with the seven transformed types of image: average filtered (window size: 3 × 3), gaussian filtered (window size: 3 × 3), JPEG compressed (quality factor: 90, 70), median filtered (window size: 3 × 3, 5 × 5), and unaltered. The visualized patterns are fed into the image input layer of the designed CNN hybrid model. Throughout the experiment, the accuracy of median filtering detection was 98% over. Also, the area under the curve (AUC) by sensitivity (TP: true positive rate) and 1-specificity (FP: false positive rate) results of the proposed IFD scheme approached to `1' on the designed CNN hybrid model. Experimental results show high efficiency and performance to classify the various transformed images. Therefore, the grade evaluation of the proposed scheme is “Excellent (A)”.

Database forensic investigation (DBFI) is an important area of research within digital forensics. It's importance is growing as digital data becomes more extensive and commonplace. The challenges associated with DBFI are numerous, and one of the challenges is the lack of a harmonized DBFI process for investigators to follow. In this paper, therefore, we conduct a survey of existing literature with the hope of understanding the body of work already accomplished. Furthermore, we build on the existing literature to present a harmonized DBFI process using design science research methodology. This harmonized DBFI process has been developed based on three key categories (i.e. planning, preparation and pre-response, acquisition and preservation, and analysis and reconstruction). Furthermore, the DBFI has been designed to avoid confusion or ambiguity, as well as providing practitioners with a systematic method of performing DBFI with a higher degree of certainty.

In this paper we consider the pollution attack in network coded systems where network nodes are computationally limited. We consider the combined use of cryptographic signature based security and information theoretic network error correction and propose a fountain-like network error correction code construction suitable for this purpose.

Summary form only given. We discuss information-theoretic methods to prove the security of cryptosystems. We study what is called, unconditionally secure (or information-theoretically secure) cryptographic schemes in search for a system that can provide long-term security and that does not impose limits on the adversary's computational power.

It is now a fact that human is the weakest link in the cybersecurity chain. Many theories from behavioural science like the theory of planned behaviour and protection motivation theory have been used to investigate the factors that affect the cybersecurity behaviour and practices of the end-user. In this paper, the researchers have used Fogg behaviour model (FBM) to study factors affecting the cybersecurity behaviour and practices of smartphone users. This study found that the odds of secure behaviour and practices by respondents with high motivation and high ability were 4.64 times more than the respondents with low motivation and low ability. This study describes how FBM may be used in the design and development of cybersecurity awareness program leading to a behaviour change.

In recent years, artificial intelligence has been widely used in the field of network security, which has significantly improved the effect of network security analysis and detection. However, because the power industrial control system is faced with the problem of shortage of attack data, the direct deployment of the network intrusion detection system based on artificial intelligence is faced with the problems of lack of data, low precision, and high false alarm rate. To solve this problem, we propose an anomaly traffic detection method based on cross-domain knowledge transferring. By using the TrAdaBoost algorithm, we achieve a lower error rate than using LSTM alone.

Reliable and secure grid operations become more and more challenging in context of increasing IT/OT convergence and decreasing dynamic margins in today's power systems. To ensure the correct operation of monitoring and control functions in control centres, an intelligent assessment of the different information sources is necessary to provide a robust data source in case of critical physical events as well as cyber-attacks. Within this paper, a holistic data stream assessment methodology is proposed using an expert knowledge based cyber-physical situational awareness for different steady and transient system states. This approach goes beyond existing techniques by combining high-resolution PMU data with SCADA information as well as Digital Twin and AI based anomaly detection functionalities.

With the advent of Industry 4.0, the Internet of Things (IoT) and Artificial Intelligence (AI), smart entities are now able to read the minds of users via extracting cognitive patterns from electroencephalogram (EEG) signals. Such brain data may include users' experiences, emotions, motivations, and other previously private mental and psychological processes. Accordingly, users' cognitive privacy may be violated and the right to cognitive privacy should protect individuals against the unconsented intrusion by third parties into the brain data as well as against the unauthorized collection of those data. This has caused a growing concern among users and industry experts that laws to protect the right to cognitive liberty, right to mental privacy, right to mental integrity, and the right to psychological continuity. In this paper, we propose an AI-enabled EEG model, namely Cognitive Privacy, that aims to protect data and classifies users and their tasks from EEG data. We present a model that protects data from disclosure using normalized correlation analysis and classifies subjects (i.e., a multi-classification problem) and their tasks (i.e., eye open and eye close as a binary classification problem) using a long-short term memory (LSTM) deep learning approach. The model has been evaluated using the EEG data set of PhysioNet BCI, and the results have revealed its high performance of classifying users and their tasks with achieving high data privacy.

Compared with traditional centralized control strategies, the distributed control systems significantly improve the flexibility and expandability of an modular multilevel converter (MMC). However, the stability issue in the MMC distributed control system with the presence of control loop coupling interactions is rarely discussed in existing research works. This article is to improve the stability of an MMC distributed control system by inhibiting the control conflict due to the coupling interactions among control loops with incomplete control information. By modeling the MMC distributed control system, the control loop coupling interactions are analyzed and the essential cause of control conflict is revealed. Accordingly, a control parameter design principle is proposed to effectively suppress the disturbances from the targeted control conflict and improve the MMC system stability. The rationality of the theoretical analysis and the effectiveness of the control parameter design principle are confirmed by simulation and experimental results.

Vendors who wish to provide software or services to large corporations and governments must often obtain numerous certificates of compliance. Each certificate asserts that the software satisfies a compliance regime, like SOC or the PCI DSS, to protect the privacy and security of sensitive data. The industry standard for obtaining a compliance certificate is an auditor manually auditing source code. This approach is expensive, error-prone, partial, and prone to regressions. We propose continuous compliance to guarantee that the codebase stays compliant on each code change using lightweight verification tools. Continuous compliance increases assurance and reduces costs. Continuous compliance is applicable to any source-code compliance requirement. To illustrate our approach, we built verification tools for five common audit controls related to data security: cryptographically unsafe algorithms must not be used, keys must be at least 256 bits long, credentials must not be hard-coded into program text, HTTPS must always be used instead of HTTP, and cloud data stores must not be world-readable. We evaluated our approach in three ways. (1) We applied our tools to over 5 million lines of open-source software. (2) We compared our tools to other publicly-available tools for detecting misuses of encryption on a previously-published benchmark, finding that only ours are suitable for continuous compliance. (3) We deployed a continuous compliance process at AWS, a large cloud-services company: we integrated verification tools into the compliance process (including auditors accepting their output as evidence) and ran them on over 68 million lines of code. Our tools and the data for the former two evaluations are publicly available.

Security for authentication is required to give a superlative secure users' personal information. This paper presents a model of the Graphical password scheme under the impact of security and ease of use for user authentication. We integrate the concept of recognition with re-called and cued-recall based schemes to offer superior security compared to existing schemes. Click Symbols (CS) Alphabet combine into one entity: Alphanumeric (A) and Visual (V) symbols (CS-AV) is Captcha-based password scheme, we integrate it with recall-based n ×n grid points, where a user can draw the shape or pattern by the intersection of the grid points as a way to enter a graphical password. Next scheme, the combination of CS-AV with grid cells allows very large password space ( 2.4 ×104 bits of entropy) and provides reasonable usability results by determining an empirical study of memorable password space. Proposed schemes support most applicable platform for input devices and promising strong resistance to shoulder surfing attacks on a mobile device which can be occurred during unlocking (pattern) the smartphone.

To ensure security, Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart (CAPTCHA) is widely used in people's online lives. This paper presents a Chinese character captcha sequential selection system based on convolutional neural network (CNN). Captchas composed of English and digits can already be identified with extremely high accuracy, but Chinese character captcha recognition is still challenging. The task we need to complete is to identify Chinese characters with different colors and different fonts that are not on a straight line with rotation and affine transformation on pictures with complex backgrounds, and then perform word order restoration on the identified Chinese characters. We divide the task into several sub-processes: Chinese character detection based on Faster R-CNN, Chinese character recognition and word order recovery based on N-Gram. In the Chinese character recognition sub-process, we have made outstanding contributions. We constructed a single Chinese character data set and built a 10-layer convolutional neural network. Eventually we achieved an accuracy of 98.43%, and completed the task perfectly.

Wide integration of information and communication technology (ICT) in modern power grids has brought many benefits as well as the risk of cyber attacks. A critical step towards defending grid cyber security is to understand the cyber-physical causal chain, which describes the progression of intrusion in cyber-space leading to the formation of consequences on the physical power grid. In this paper, we develop an attack vector for a time delay attack at load frequency control in the power grid. Distinct from existing works, which are separately focused on cyber intrusion, grid response, or testbed validation, the proposed attack vector for the first time provides a full cyber-physical causal chain. It targets specific vulnerabilities in the protocols, performs a denial-of-service (DoS) attack, induces the delays in control loop, and destabilizes grid frequency. The proposed attack vector is proved in theory, presented as an attack tree, and validated in an experimental environment. The results will provide valuable insights to develop security measures and robust controls against time delay attacks.

Although OpenFlow-based SDN networks make it easier to design and test new protocols, when you think of clean slate architectures, their use is quite limited because the parameterization of its flows resides primarily in TCP/IP protocols. Besides, despite the many benefits that SDN offers, some aspects have not yet been adequately addressed, such as management plane activities, network startup, and options for connecting the data plane to the control plane. Based on these issues and limitations, this work presents a bootstrap protocol for SDN-based networks, which allows, beyond the network topology discovery, automatic configuration of an inband control plane. The protocol is designed to act only on layer two, in an autonomous, distributed and deterministic way, with low overhead and has the intent to be the basement for the implementation of other management plane related activities. A formal specification of the protocol is provided. In addition, an analytical model was created to preview the number of required messages to establish the control plane. According to this model, the proposed protocol presents less overhead than similar de-facto protocols used to topology discovery in SDN networks.

TV networks are no longer just closed networks. They are increasingly carrying Internet services, integrating and interoperating with home IoT and the Internet. In addition, client devices are becoming intelligent. At the same time, they are facing more security risks. Security incidents such as attacks on TV systems are commonplace, and there are many incidents that cause negative effects. The security protection of TV networks mainly adopts security protection schemes similar to other networks, such as constructing a security perimeter; there are few security researches specifically carried out for client-side devices. This paper focuses on the mainstream architecture of the integration of HFC TV network and the Internet, and conducts a comprehensive security test and analysis for client-side devices including EOC cable bridge gateways and smart TV Set-Top-BoX. Results show that the TV network client devices have severe vulnerabilities such as command injection and system debugging interfaces. Attackers can obtain the system control of TV clients without authorization. In response to the results, we put forward systematic suggestions on the client security protection of smart TV networks in current days.

We present ClearTrack, a system that tracks meta-data for each primitive value in Java programs to detect and nullify a range of vulnerabilities such as integer overflow/underflow and SQL/command injection vulnerabilities. Contributions include new techniques for eliminating false positives associated with benign integer overflows and underflows, new metadata-aware techniques for detecting and nullifying SQL/command command injection attacks, and results from an independent evaluation team. These results show that 1) ClearTrack operates successfully on Java programs comprising hundreds of thousands of lines of code (including instrumented jar files and Java system libraries, the majority of the applications comprise over 3 million lines of code), 2) because of computations such as cryptography and hash table calculations, these applications perform millions of benign integer overflows and underflows, and 3) ClearTrack successfully detects and nullifies all tested integer overflow and underflow and SQL/command injection vulnerabilities in the benchmark applications.

We present CrypTFlow, a first of its kind system that converts TensorFlow inference code into Secure Multi-party Computation (MPC) protocols at the push of a button. To do this, we build three components. Our first component, Athos, is an end-to-end compiler from TensorFlow to a variety of semihonest MPC protocols. The second component, Porthos, is an improved semi-honest 3-party protocol that provides significant speedups for TensorFlow like applications. Finally, to provide malicious secure MPC protocols, our third component, Aramis, is a novel technique that uses hardware with integrity guarantees to convert any semi-honest MPC protocol into an MPC protocol that provides malicious security. The malicious security of the protocols output by Aramis relies on integrity of the hardware and semi-honest security of MPC. Moreover, our system matches the inference accuracy of plaintext TensorFlow.We experimentally demonstrate the power of our system by showing the secure inference of real-world neural networks such as ResNet50 and DenseNet121 over the ImageNet dataset with running times of about 30 seconds for semi-honest security and under two minutes for malicious security. Prior work in the area of secure inference has been limited to semi-honest security of small networks over tiny datasets such as MNIST or CIFAR. Even on MNIST/CIFAR, CrypTFlow outperforms prior work.

Learning programming language of Java is a basic part of the Computer Science and Engineering curriculum. Specific Java compiler is a requirement for writing and convert the writing code to executable format. However, some local installed Java compiler is suffering from compatibility, portability and storage space issues. These issues sometimes affect student-learning interest and slow down the learning process. This paper is directed toward the solution for such problems, which offers a new programming assignment submission system with cloud-based Java compiler and is known as CheckMyCode. Leveraging cloud-computing technology in terms of its availability, prevalence and affordability, CheckMyCode implements Java cloud-based programming compiler as a part of the assignment management system. CheckMyCode system is a cloud-based system that allows both main users, which are a lecturer and student to access the system via a browser on PC or smart devices. Modules of submission assignment system with cloud compiler allow lecturer and student to manage Java programming task in one platform. A framework, system module, main user and feature of CheckMyCode are presented. Also, taking into account are the future study/direction and new enhancement of CheckMyCode.

Deep Learning methods have not only shown to improve software performance in compiler heuristics, but also e.g. to improve security in vulnerability prediction or to boost developer productivity in software engineering tools. A key to the success of such methods across these use cases is the expressiveness of the representation used to abstract from the program code. Recent work has shown that different such representations have unique advantages in terms of performance. However, determining the best-performing one for a given task is often not obvious and requires empirical evaluation. Therefore, we present ComPy-Learn, a toolbox for conveniently defining, extracting, and exploring representations of program code. With syntax-level language information from the Clang compiler frontend and low-level information from the LLVM compiler backend, the tool supports the construction of linear and graph representations and enables an efficient search for the best-performing representation and model for tasks on program code.

Wireless networks are very significant in the present world owing to their widespread use and its application in domains like disaster management, smart cities, IoT etc. A wireless network is made up of a group of wireless nodes that communicate with each other without using any formal infrastructure. The topology of the wireless network is not fixed and it can vary. The huge increase in the number of wireless devices is a challenge owing to the limited availability of wireless spectrum. Opportunistic spectrum access by Cognitive radio enables the efficient usage of limited spectrum resources. The unused channels assigned to the primary users may go waste in idle time. Cognitive radio systems will sense the unused channel space and assigns it temporarily for secondary users. This paper discusses about the recent trends in the two most important aspects of Cognitive radio namely spectrum sensing and security.

Cognitive radio systems aim to solve the issue of spectrum scarcity through implementation of dynamic spectrum management and cooperative spectrum access. However, the structure of such systems introduced unique types of vulnerabilities and attacks, one of which is spectrum sensing data falsification attack (SSDF). In such attacks malicious users provide incorrect observations to the fusion center of the system, which may result in severe quality of service degradation and interference for licensed users. In this paper we investigate this type of attacks and propose a combined approach to their mitigation. On the first step a reputational method is used to isolate the initially untrustworthy nodes, on the second step specialized q-out-of-m fusion rule is utilized to mitigate the remains of attack. In this paper we present theoretical analysis of the proposed combined method.

Cognitive radio is development of wireless communication and mobile computing. Spectrum is a limited source. The licensed spectrum is proposed to be used only by the spectrum owners. Cognitive radio is a new view of the recycle licensed spectrum in an unlicensed manner. The main condition of the cognitive radio network is sensing the spectrum hole. Cognitive radio can be detect unused spectrum. It shares this with no interference to the licensed spectrum. It can be a sense signals. It makes viable communication in the middle of multiple users through co-operation in a self-organized manner. The energy detector method is unseen signal detector because it reject the data of the signal.In this paper, has implemented Simulink Energy Detection of spectrum sensing cognitive radio in a MATLAB Simulink to Exploit spectrum holes and avoid damaging interference to licensed spectrum and unlicensed spectrum. The hidden primary user problem will happened because fading or shadowing. Ithappens when cognitive radio could not be detected by primer users because of its location. Cooperative sensing spectrum sensing is the best-proposed method to solve the hidden problem.

The widespread use of computing devices and the heavy dependence on the internet has evolved the cyberspace to a cyber world - something comparable to an artificial world. This paper focuses on one of the major problems of the cyber world - cyber security or more specifically computer malware. We show that computer malware is a perfect example of an artificial ecosystem with a co-evolutionary predator-prey framework. We attempt to merge the two domains of biologically inspired computing and computer malware. Under the aegis of proactive defense, this paper discusses the possibilities, challenges and opportunities in fusing evolutionary computing techniques with malware creation.

The current trend of IoT user is toward the use of services and data externally due to voluminous processing, which demands resourceful machines. Instead of relying on the cloud of poor connectivity or a limited bandwidth, the IoT user prefers to use a cloudlet-based fog computing. However, the choice of cloudlet is solely dependent on its trust and reliability. In practice, even though a cloudlet possesses a required trusted platform module (TPM), we argue that the presence of a TPM is not enough to make the cloudlet trustworthy as the TPM supports only the primitive security of the bootstrap. Besides uncertainty in security, other uncertain conditions of the network (e.g. network bandwidth, latency and expectation time to complete a service request for cloud-based services) may also prevail for the cloudlets. Therefore, in order to evaluate the trust value of multiple cloudlets under uncertainty, this paper broadly proposes the empirical process for evaluation of trust. This will be followed by a measure of trust-based reputation of cloudlets through computational intelligence such as fuzzy logic and ant colony optimization (ACO). In the process, fuzzy logic-based inference and membership evaluation of trust are presented. In addition, ACO and its pheromone communication across different colonies are being modeled with multiple cloudlets. Finally, a measure of affinity or popular trust and reputation of the cloudlets is also proposed. Together with the context of application under multiple cloudlets, the computationally intelligent approaches have been investigated in terms of performance. Hence the contribution is subjected towards building a trusted cloudlet-based fog platform.

The legacy security defense mechanisms cannot resist where emerging sophisticated threats such as zero-day and malware campaigns have profoundly changed the dimensions of cyber-attacks. Recent studies indicate that cyber threat intelligence plays a crucial role in implementing proactive defense operations. It provides a knowledge-sharing platform that not only increases security awareness and readiness but also enables the collaborative defense to diminish the effectiveness of potential attacks. In this paper, we propose a secure distributed model to facilitate cyber threat intelligence sharing among diverse participants. The proposed model uses blockchain technology to assure tamper-proof record-keeping and smart contracts to guarantee immutable logic. We use an open-source permissioned blockchain platform, Hyperledger Fabric, to implement the blockchain application. We also utilize the flexibility and management capabilities of Software-Defined Networking to be integrated with the proposed sharing platform to enhance defense perspectives against threats in the system. In the end, collaborative DDoS attack mitigation is taken as a case study to demonstrate our approach.